A Note on the First Narrator of "The Turn of the Screw"

Abstract

W RITING of Turn of the Screw in the New York edition of his works, Henry James draws our attention to the importance for the book's full, chilling effect of things unsaid and undoneportentous, unstateable intimations whose mode is necessarily that of negation and omission: point is . . . that some things are never done at all: this negative quantity is large-certain reserves and properties and immobilities consistently impose themselves.1 A number of such reserves impose themselves upon us before the tale has properly begun and, in their minor but intriguing way, foreshadow the harsher constrictions under which the governess has to labour. I refer to the succession of concealments and enigmas in the frame or prologue of the tale that characterizes in particular the relationship between the unnamed narrator and Douglas, and between Douglas and the dead governess. Some readers have found the drama of this induction sufficiently provoking to view the frame as an independent little action divorceable from the governess's tale that follows it: 'frame' is contrived with such complexity and detail that it might nearly stand as a short story by itself, some 3000 words long, Douglas' tribute to the governess.2 The two main characters in this short story are the narrator and Douglas, between whom exists a curious, provocative intimacy. In the narrator's case, James's imposition of reserve operates first of all in the denial of a name, even though Mr. Griffin has his despite the fact that he is an entirely peripheral character, the narrator of the previous ghost story (which we do not hear) involving a child.